Products maintained by an entity are generally tracked through inventory records. The inventory records maintain a count of each type of product in inventory. For a centralized inventory system that tracks products that will ultimately be distributed to various field inventory sites or in-service field locations, a location assignment is maintained in the inventory record for each instance of the count for each product type. The count and location assignment permits an entity to maintain a sufficient number of items in central inventory for a particular field location that is supplied by the central inventory.
The price each product costs when purchased and its vintage, or year of purchase, may be tracked in the inventory record as well. Tracking the price and vintage is useful for accounting purposes, such as scheduling depreciation of the items in inventory. Additionally, items in inventory may be grouped according to the count of items having a particular status, such as one count for the new items, another count for the items that are in inventory but have been used in the field and will be reused when needed, and items that are currently in-service at a field inventory site or service location.
For reasons such as maintaining an adequate inventory for each location and for properly accounting for the items in inventory, it is important to maintain an accurate inventory record as a part of an entity's bookkeeping practices. However, items in inventory are constantly in flux, so inventory records must be frequently updated. For example, items in inventory may be maintained in a central warehouse, maintained in a field warehouse at a location assignment, used in the field at the location assignment, and/or discarded. A periodic recount of the inventory is performed and is compared to the inventory record to reconcile any changes in the inventory with the count of the inventory record.
Often, the comparison of the recount to the count of the central inventory record results in items being found in inventory that are not accounted for by the count of the central inventory record. This situation requires a write-on, or an instance of a product being added to the count of the central inventory record. When a write-on occurs in the central inventory record, a location assignment must be provided for each instance being added to the count. If price and vintage are being tracked in the central inventory record, then a price and vintage must also be assigned for each instance being added.
At other times, the comparison may result in more instances of the count in the central inventory record than there are items in inventory. This situation requires a write-off, or an instance of a product being deleted from the count of the central inventory record. When a write-off occurs in the central inventory record, an instance to be removed must be chosen from the set of instances having various location assignments.
In many cases, items in inventory have no serialization. Therefore, there is no way to know whether a particular location assignment belongs to a particular item and there may be no way to know the price and vintage information for the item. The conventional practice to provide the price and vintage information for write-ons has been to assign an arbitrary price and vintage by finding the earliest vintage and its corresponding price in the inventory record and assigning this earliest vintage. This conventional approach is flawed because the earliest vintage is not an accurate representation for all write-ons and the location assignment for the write-ons remains unresolved. Similarly, for write-offs, the location assignment for an instance to be deleted form the record is arbitrarily chosen, and disproportionate location assignments for a product may result.
Therefore, there is a need for a central inventory reconciliation system that addresses these central inventory reconciliation problems including resolving the location assignment issues for write-ons and write-offs.